David Ellison’s Bid To Control Warner Bros. Hits The Rocks

Until a month ago, everything was going great for David Ellison and his plan to control American cultural production. He’d successfully made Paramount an outer arm of the Trump Administration, with all the lucrative sinecures and harrowing moral and journalistic compromises that come with such an arrangement. Ellison’s smooth ascent to power took a little bump when he lost the initial bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, but his father is Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, and he’s a close ally of Donald Trump, so he threatened and bought his way into a hostile takeover that WBD shareholders approved in February and the U.S. Justice Department approved in June. Congratulations David Ellison, nobody will make a good movie or say anything faintly critical about Israel on CNN ever again.

Or so he thought. Even before the DOJ rubber-stamped the deal, Bloomberg reported that several states were looking into mounting a joint legal challenge. On July 13, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed suit in Sacramento after getting 11 other states including New York to join him in the legal effort. In a column for Variety (which, balls-and-strikes, needed a little editing) that dropped alongside the suit, Bonta wrote that the merger would create a super-entity immune from competition, one that could exert the directed force of monopoly control.

“By combining two of the five largest film distributors and two of the five largest basic cable channel owners, the resulting media behemoth would control nearly one-third of theatrical movie distribution and nearly one-third of basic cable channels,” he wrote. “It would control more than 30 percent of the blockbuster release distribution that buoys the movie theater business and 50 of the most popular cable TV channels, spanning an unrivaled slate of news, sports, entertainment, kids, family, factual, and lifestyle content.” The result? “That’s a death knell for the film and TV industry — and for our democracy.”